In one aspect, the present invention comprises a document citation overview tool (CTO) that allows users to see how often documents from different resources (particular authors, journals or record baskets) have been cited in a selected year range. CTO fulfills a need in the scientific market for easy to use tools for bibliometric analyses.
On the document citation overview page (see FIG. 1), a two-dimensional table is used to display citation counts. There are varieties of citation counts provided by this table:                By selected document and selected year (cell value)        By selected document and selected year range (row total)        By all selected documents and per selected year (column total)        By all selected documents and selected year range (grand total)        
Thousands of documents may be analyzed together. Users can select a year range, configure the number of documents displayed on each page if multiple pages are needed for display, and navigate pages through “previous” and “next” buttons. A citation weight may be displayed that shows the number of citations (grand total) divided by the number of all selected documents for the selected year range.
Users also may save a document set into a saved basket and access a cited-by-result list by clicking a citation count to display all citations associated with that count. In various embodiments, in addition to using dimensions of document and year, users can search on other parameters (author names, institutes, journal names, subjects, etc.) in various combinations.
Although those skilled in the art will be able to make and use a citation tool and citation overview pages based on the functional description below, additional technical solutions to technical problems were required in order to have a citation tool capable of providing search results in a short period of time. Users typically are not satisfied with great results if those results take too long to obtain. Those technical solutions also are described herein.
A strategy that likely would have been used by those familiar with the prior art, would have been to use a naive XQuery approach for the citation queries.